Regrowing your left over vegetables!

With lockdown in full effect, we’re as guilty as a lot of people of spending quite a bit more time glued to the mobile phone and on social media. Our online adventures weren’t all wasted though because a few weeks ago we stumbled across a video which showed that it’s possible to regrow the remnants of your vegetables, giving yourself an almost abundant supply of them. Given everything going on at the moment this peaked our interest – especially in the marketing team’s household which has some members who follow a plant-based diet, we get through veggies like there’s no tomorrow.

With a degree of entrepreneurial spirit, a huge pinch of salt because it was an internet video and a lot of free time at the moment, we followed the very simple instructions and got started. Essentially all you need are the bottom of your vegetables and a glass of water, or so the theory goes. You use as much of the vegetable as you need and then you fill the glass with enough water to cover the bottom half of the vegetable – easy.

It’s quite miraculous, but if you leave them somewhere where they have access to a little bit of sun, it won’t be long before you start getting shoots of greenery from what would usually be food scraps. You can see we amassed quite the collection over a few days.

We knew it was possible to cut rosemary and have it grow with very little effort – it’s a fantastic way to give inexpensive gifts, especially if people have just moved into a new house, they’re genuinely grateful to have a start on a new herb patch. We were genuinely amazed though, at the resilience of the plants and that they have enough nutrients in them to start regrowing.

We’re at the stage where all of the vegetables have started regrowing roots as well, so we’ve decided to move them outside into our little growing beds. We don’t have a huge amount of outdoor space here, but you don’t need much more than a few square feet to get started. The lettuces are doing really well, as is one of the celery plants. The leeks and the other celery, might not make it though. For a first attempt a 50% success rate is pretty good in our book and we’re still genuinely amazed this works.

So, if you have a little free time and you’re looking to same a few pennies, if you’ve been furloughed for example, this could be a brilliant way to do just just. If you’re normally eating these vegetables anyway, there’s very little care and attention needed to start this process and if we can do it, we’re certain everyone else can too!

If you’re looking for fruit and vegetables at the moment, don’t forget that our local farm shops are available and doing a fantastic job supporting our communities, many are even delivering too! You can find your local one on our local food map here.

If you’d like to see what other vegetables you’re meant to be able to do this with, have a read here.